“I read it in a newspaper,” said Corona.
“I do declare,” exclaimed Mrs. Archibald, “everything is in the newspapers! I did think that we might settle down here and enjoy ourselves without people talking about our reason for coming!”
“You don’t mean to say,” cried Mrs. Perkenpine, now on her feet, “that you two elderly ones is the honey-mooners?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Archibald, looking with amusement on the astonished faces about him, “we truly are.”
“Well,” said the she-guide, seating herself, “if I’d stayed an old maid as long as that, I think I’d stuck it out. But perhaps you was a widow, mum?”
“No, indeed,” cried Mr. Archibald; “she was a charming girl when I married her. But just let me tell you how the matter stands,” and he proceeded to relate the facts of the case. “I thought,” he said, in conclusion, turning to Matlack, “that perhaps you knew about it, for I told Mr. Sadler, and I supposed he might have mentioned it to you.”
“No, sir,” said Matlack, relighting his pipe, “he knows me better than that. If he’d called me and said, ‘Phil, I want you to take charge of a couple that’s goin’ honey-moonin’ about twenty-five years after they married, and a-doin’ it for somebody else and not for themselves,’ I’d said to him, ‘They’re lunatics, and I won’t take charge of them.’ And Peter he knows I would have thought that and would have said it, and so he did not mention the particulars to me. He knows that the only things that I’m afraid of in this world is lunatics. ‘Tisn’t only what they might do to me, but what they might do to themselves, and I won’t touch ’em.”
“I hope,” said Mrs. Archibald, “that you don’t consider us lunatics now that you have heard why we are here.”
“Oh no,” said the guide; “I’ve found that you’re regular common-sense people, and I don’t change my opinions even when I’ve heard particulars; but if I’d heard particulars first, it would have been all up with my takin’ charge of you.”
“And you knew it all the time?” said Clyde to Margery, speaking so that she only could hear.